How the Times selected Sam’s letter I’ll never know, but it prompted my editor to telephone and read it aloud to me over breakfast, claiming that the list of artists only bolstered his theory that great suffering produces great art, and since I’d had my share of the former, I should now move north to more civilized environs. I declared myself a loyal Southerner to the last and headed out for Judge Franklin’s office. I forgot the article during our conference, but after I loaded Marston’s charred file boxes into my trunk, I heard a Jackson disc jockey reading Sam’s letter on the air as I drove to the Natchez Examiner building. Sam Jacobs will be a household name throughout the South by nightfall.

Caitlin has offered me her glass-walled conference room as a work space, plus staff volunteers to help me wade through the files. After I lug Marston’s boxes into the conference room, she gathers her reporters, photographers, and interns for a brief orientation. The Examiner is used as a training ground for the Masters media group; thus the staff hails from all points of the compass. Not one among them is over thirty, and all are rabid liberals. I view this as a positive, for when the Marston camp discovers I’m using these kids against them, they’ll almost certainly try to bribe a few for inside information. Youth and left-wing politics may give my team an immunity to filthy lucre that I couldn’t hope to find elsewhere.

Caitlin’s speech is modeled on those given by army officers requesting volunteers for particularly dirty missions. She succinctly summarizes my reasons for provoking the slander suit, then in broad strokes describes what we’ll be looking for in the mountain of paper that will arrive later in the day.

“This is an unusual situation,” she concludes. “Some of you may think I’m stepping over an ethical line by involving the paper in a legal proceeding that we’ll be reporting on. That’s true enough. But I stepped over a harder line when I printed Mr. Cage’s charges. We’ll be reporting this story the way papers reported stories in the good old bad old days. We’re throwing the full weight of our media group behind a cause.”

A buzz of approval runs through her audience.

“We are seeking the truth about a terrible crime, and I’ll publish the truth as I find it, whether it conforms to my preconceptions or not. I think that lives up to the truest spirit of objectivity.”

A burst of applause follows this. Two of the male reporters, whose goatees make them look like anarchists in a Sergei Eisenstein film, pump their fists in the air.